Monday, May 11, 2020

Moog Subharmonicon Semi-Modular Synthesizer Sounds (with DFAM)

Published on May 11, 2020 Perfect Circuit

"The Moog Subharmonicon has been anticipated since it was the synth built during the 2018 Moogfest Engineering Workshop. It is finally here as a production synth with a few upgrades from the Moogfest version. This production version has midi, a built in quantizer, more envelope controls and a slightly different sequencer section.

The Subharmonicon is built around divider circuits. There are two VCOs that each have two dividers that output frequencies between the base frequency 1/1, an octave below 1/2, an octave and a fifth below 1/3, two octaves below 1/4, two octaves and a fourth below 1/5, all the way down to four octaves below 1/16. The two oscillators and the four subdivisions can be mixed together into six note chords that span multiple octaves, the oscillators then of course go through a Moog ladder filter. There are a pair of envelopes for the VCA and VCF.

The sequencing also works with subdivisions of the tempo clock, there are four dividers that divided the master clock from 1/1 to 1/16 in integer divisions. These four dividers can trigger the envelopes and clock the two four step sequencers. The sequencers can then modulate the pitch of the two main VCOs, or select which divisions the subdividers are set to. Since the Subharmonicon is semi-modular its has a patch bay where different signal and control routing setups can be experimented with. The patch bay also makes connecting the Subharmonicon to a Mother 32, DFAM, or any other semi-modular or eurorack synth easy.

In this video we showed a combination of the Subharmonicon by itself as well as with a DFAM for percussion and with a Cooper FX Outward V2. The sidechain style patch at 5:09 uses a Ritual Electronics Anima Function generator to create the sidechain envelope and the Subharmonicon is going through a Tiptop Echoz delay module.